Tomorrow's Kin

EPILOGUE

S plus 9 years

Sunday evenings always bustled, she thought, no matter how much planning had gone into the next week. No matter how much relaxation had taken place over the weekend. No matter how lazy the weather, like this warm August sunset of still air, humming crickets, sweet fragrance of lilies.

She sat on the front steps of her rented house, a half-eaten peach juicy in her hand, a stack of textbooks beside her. The children played in the cornfield next door, some game that involved a lot of running and shouting; occasionally one of their bright T-shirts flashed through the stalks, a pink or red or orange comet. Harrison came out of the house, suitcase in hand.

“All packed?” Marianne said.

“I travel light.” He put down the suitcase and lowered himself to sit beside her. “Preparing your syllabi?”

“Nominally, anyway.” The semester started in two more weeks, and she would be teaching two classes she’d taught before and one for the first time, all in evolutionary biology.

He took her hand, a little awkwardly. Their relationship, simultaneously old and new, was still finding its way and, contrary to what Harrison had just said, neither of them traveled light. Too much had happened.

She said, “Good luck with the speech in Chicago.”

“Thanks.” And then, “I wish you were going with me.”

She squeezed his hand. She wrote Harrison’s speeches so he didn’t have to take too much time from his research, but she could not give them herself. No one wanted to hear Marianne Jenner talk about careful screening and control of interaction with World, not after she had spent eight years advocating just the opposite. Flip-flopper was the kindest of the invectives hurled at her now. Most people didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, understand that experience modified political stances, or that isolationism and brotherhood were not a dichotomy but two ends of a continuum, with many viable points between them. She had always fought to protect Earth, but now World needed protection, too. Everything was intertwined—Terra and World, profit and idealism, ecology and progress—and the only way forward was to respect those sometimes inconvenient connections.

Harrison, unlike Marianne, could make these points, and did. His work in neurology had earned him that. The SuperHearers—the media’s dumb name for children born after the spore plague—were now contented pre- and elementary-school kids. Harrison had blended his careful work in neurochemicals and cranial electrical mapping with the hastier research of Stubbins’s pharmaceutical team. The result was Audexica, one of the most successful drugs ever known. Public pressure combined with sheer volume kept the price low. Humanitarian groups had cooperated to manufacture, ship, and distribute it around the world. Eighty-nine percent of Terran children now took Audexica.

“I wonder what ‘normal’ really means,” Marianne said.

Harrison didn’t have to ask why his affectionate statement had led to musing about statistics. They followed each other’s unspoken thoughts. No one else had “got” her in that way since Evan, nearly a decade ago. It felt nice. The sex was nice, too, and if it was no more than that—well, nobody got everything.

Harrison said, “Whatever definition of normal you use, we’re not it.”

She laughed. “See you on Friday?”

“Yes.” He kissed her and stood. Weekdays he spent at Columbia, weekends here. She wondered how long it would be before they decided to get a place together, probably in New York. Or maybe here. Harrison was well over sixty—surely he would retire some day?

No, probably not. No more than she would, until they had to.

Jason burst out of the field, spiky corn leaves and silky tassel fibers festooning him like ornaments on a Christmas tree. Colin, Luke, Sara, and Sam trailed behind him. “Grandma! We found a ditch with a lot of frogs!”

“Wow!” Marianne said. “How big are they?”

“One is big!” Colin said, panting up behind his older brother. “I heard them first!”

Of course he did. Neither Colin nor Luke took Audexica. Stubbins’s drug had induced methylation to turn off the genes responsible for hyper-hearing—the same genes that R. sporii had turned on. But the drug had had unpleasant side effects. Audexica, however, didn’t block hyper-hearing. Instead it strengthened neural pathways that let children filter and, eventually, classify ultrasonic and infrasonic noises the way children like Colin and Luke had learned to do by themselves. As kids matured, more of them could do without the drug but keep the hyper-hearing.

Luke, his broad round face glistening with sweat, said, “Two kinds of frogs. Little ones in trees and big ones in water.”

Jason said, “I caught a little one and held it!”

“Be careful,” Marianne said. “Those tree frogs are really fragile. You don’t want to hurt it.”

“’Course not!” Sam said indignantly, at the same moment that Sara said, “They’re cute!”

Marianne smiled at the twins, who lived on the other side of the cornfield. They were just a few months younger than Colin. None of that generation hurt animals. Eight now, Colin was a self-elected vegetarian. He’d insisted that his father hire a “plant doctor” for a tree infected with oak wilt. He watered parched wildflowers. He put out salt licks for deer. There had always been kids like that, but now there was a whole generation of them, everywhere, and eventually they would grow to adulthood, still sensitive to Earth’s biomass.

They were, Marianne, allowed herself to think, the best hope for the planet.

A car turned off the road and pulled into the driveway. The twins’ father leaned out the window and called, “Hi, Marianne. Kids, time to go home.”

“Not yet!” Sara cried.

“Yes, yet. Come on, get in.”

Sara and Sam went to the car, feet dragging. Marianne said, “Go on inside, you two, and wash your hands. With soap.”

“Race you!” Jason said.

“No fair! You got a head start!”

Marianne ate the rest of her peach. Ryan came out onto the porch. “Mom? What are you doing out here? The mosquitoes are starting.”

“I know. I’m coming in. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

She turned her head to look up at him, backlit by light from the house. Too thin, still, but here.

“About Jonah Stubbins. His trial starts next week. But… he did this, you know. Along with everything else, he contributed a lot to this great thing for the world’s children.”

Ryan didn’t answer.

“Did you catch the news earlier? About that girl in Indonesia who heard the tsunami coming just the way the animals did? She warned her whole village to get to high ground and saved I don’t know how many lives.”

“I heard,” Ryan said tonelessly.

“And that kid in Russia who rescued a nest of mice from a cat because he heard their ultrasonic cries? Mus is returning to Ukraine and Kazakhstan, too.”

“I heard.”

She had to stop. Ryan was still fragile; too much information connected in any way with the spore cloud brought an edge to his voice. She changed the subject.

“When does Elizabeth’s plane land tomorrow?”

“Noon. I’ll go get her.”

“No, let me go. You stay with the boys.” It would be better if Elizabeth got to rant to Marianne before they reached the house. Because there would be a rant about something; there always was.

For the first time, she realized that Elizabeth was fragile, too. Her anger was how she protected herself, just as Ryan’s deep depression had been how he punished himself. Maybe Noah, her drifter, had been the strongest one, after all.

She gazed upward at the “summer triangle” of stars emerging in the navy-blue sky. Altair, Vega, Deneb. Would she ever see Noah again? Maybe. Neither the Venture, now government property, nor the Mest’/Stremlenie had yet taken off for World. The United States and Russia were “in negotiation,” a polite word for a standoff. Meanwhile, other nations’ ships were finally nearing completion. Then what?

Nobody knew.

“Mom, the mosquitoes.”

“Okay, okay, I’m coming.”

She rose from the porch, dusted off the seat of her jeans, and went into the lighted house.